Generally, books, catalogs, and other larger scale publications are created and stored electronically as a number of individual electronic documents. For example, each chapter of a book may be stored as a separate electronic file. To produce the book each electronic file is opened using, for example, a word processor and a print request is then issued. The print requests may be directed to a single or group of printers. In a network environment, each print request may originate from a different computer. Each printer is only capable of printing one file at a time, so multiple print requests sent to a single printer are electronically stored in a queue. As the printer completes one request, another is released from the queue until each file is printed and the book is ready to be assembled.
In many conventional printing systems such as those used in office environments, for in-house and desktop publishing, and even in some large scale professional publishing systems, the print requests for each document, a book for example, are managed individually within the queues for each printer. In addition to the print requests for the book, the queues for each printer may also contain print requests for other documents. As the number of print requests increase so does the complexity of managing the queues. Should one printer temporarily fail, the other printers continue, and the user is not specifically alerted that a portion of the book is not being printed. Moreover, managing each print request for a larger scale production is cumbersome. For example, to delete or change the priority of the print requests for a given document, each request must be accessed individually within its respective queue. So, to stop or pause the printing of that document, a user is required to individually stop or pause the print requests for each file that makes up that document.
A second problem arises when a user wishes to track the print status for a book or other larger scale job. With any number of print requests being directed to any number of different printers, it becomes nearly impossible to know for certain when an entire job is completed or whether a printing error for a particular print request relates to a particular job. In a networked environment, five jobs containing five print requests are often directed to five different printers—one request from each job is sent to each printer. The conventional print queues for each printer provide individual control for and status of each print request. The queues do not associate the requests with a particular job. So, to track the status of a job, one must access the print queue for each of the five printers and manually determine which print request in each queue is associated with that job.